The Leading Classical Music Label Direct To You

Read reviews, listen to the music, and purchase the CD COSTE: Guitar Works, Vol. 5

Customer Service Toll Free 866.489.4152

Music AND Flowers. The Perfect Gifts.

Spend $50 or more on NaxosDirect and we'll give you a $10 coupon for 1800Flowers.com family of stores. Offer ends Feb. 12th. Need suggestions? Click here

Flash 9 required. Click to download.

Narrow your search
with our Music Browser

Classical Music

        Ballet
        Chamber Music
        Choral
        Concertos
        Film Music
        Folk Legends
        Instrumental
        Musicals
        Opera / Operetta
        Orchestral
        Vocal

Jazz

Jazz Contemporary
Jazz Icons

New Age

Wind Band

World

        Ballad
        Bhuddist
        Chinese Music
        Classical (World)
        Early Music (World)
        Folk
        Gamelan
        Gypsy
        Hindustani
        Jazz (World)
        Klezmer
        Sufi
        Vocal (World)
        World

Special Offers:

Free MP3 Downloads

Catalogs

Internship Opportunities

Celebrating Black History

Grammy Winners on Sale

Masters of American Music

Valentine�s Day Special

Clearance

Penguin Guide

200 Essential Recordings

Recently Released

Upcoming Releases

SACD

DVD

        Ballet DVD
        Classical Concert
        Classical Documentary
        Dance Documentary
        Opera DVD
        Pop/Rock Concert

Audio Books

        Anthologies / Collections
        Arts
        Biographies
        Children's Classics
        Classic Fiction
        Great Epics and Tales
        History
        Junior Classic Fiction
        Junior History
        Literature
        Music Biographies
        Music Education
        Non-Fiction
        Philosophy
        Plays - Others
        Plays - Shakespeare
        Poetry
        Religion
        Samplers
        Sports
        Wine Guide

NaxosDirect Podcasts

Video Librarian Reviews

Labels

Naxos Label

        Naxos American Classics
        Naxos Best Of...
        Naxos Box Sets
        Naxos Cinema Classics
        Naxos Classics
        Naxos DVD
        Naxos DVD-Audio
        Naxos International
        Naxos Jazz
        Naxos Limited Edition
        Naxos Milken Archives
        Naxos Night Music
        Naxos Opera
        Naxos Orchestral
        Naxos Special Release
        Naxos Wind Band Classics
        Naxos World

Composers

Conductors

Ensembles

Orchestras

Choirs

Artists

Instruments

Producers

COSTE: Guitar Works, Vol. 5

Home

Classical Music

Instrumental

View large image

Total playing time: 01:09:26

$8.99 (CD)

In Stock - Usually ships within 24 hours.

Link to this CD Link to this page

Napoleon Coste (1806-1883) Guitar Music Vol. 5 Napoleon Coste was France's greatest guitar composer. Born in a village in eastern France and called after...

Read more about this recording

Napoleon Coste (1806-1883)

Guitar Music Vol. 5

Napoleon Coste was France's greatest guitar composer. Born in a village in eastern France and called after the new Emperor (the famous battles of Trafalgar and Austerlitz were both fought in the year of his birth), Coste was at first groomed for a military career. From the age of six, young Napoleon also began to play the guitar, taking his first lessons from his mother. At the age of eleven he suffered an extended and serious il1ness; plans for his military career were abandoned, but his musical talents blossomed. Coste gained local fame as a performer and teacher of the guitar in Valenciennes, and in 1828 even played duets with the visiting Italian virtuoso Luigi Sagrini (they performed Giuliani's Op. 130). In 1830, the year of the July Revolution, he moved to Paris to pursue his career. Paris was not only one of the great cultural centres of the world, it was also, in the 1820s, home to a guitaromanie, a rage for the guitar, which probably did not so much abate in the 1830s as become less remarkable in a city which saw new fads commencing daily Coste, who had apparently had little formal training in music, studied theory and composition and also became the friend and pupil of Fernando Sor (1778-1839), the esteemed Spanish composer and guitarist.

All of the works on this recording (with the exception of Op. 41) were probably written in the last decade of the composer's life. Over a decade earlier, an accidental fal1 had damaged his right arm and hand, effectively ending his concert career. Coste nevertheless continued teaching and composing; his last pieces, which he published himself, represent a sort of apogee of his art. Free of both editorial and technical restraints (he, after all, would never be expected to play them), he wrote here some of his most imaginative, expressive, and difficult works. A quintessential Romantic, the composer found inspiration in the changing seasons (Opp. 41-42), in Alpine landscapes and nostalgia for his lost youth (Op. 44), in tragic emotion (Op. 43), and in poetic sensibility (Op. 45).

Coste's La Ronde de Mai, precedee d'un Larghetto: Divertissement, Op. 42, opens with an elaborate introduction, filled with shimmering Chopinesque cadenzas (one in harmonics), which leads directly into a rhapsodic scherzo, far from the folkloric dance of spring suggested by the title.

Feuilles d'Automne: Douze valses, Op. 41, is a splendid set of waltzes, perhaps the finest ever written for guitar. A rich assortment of melodies seems to pour from the composer's fecund imagination; the mood shifts constantly, at times rustic and bumptious, then gentle and wistful. The music was probably composed as early as 1856, since a work by the same name (and described as Op. 27, a number later assigned to a different piece) was among the five pieces Coste submitted in a celebrated competition that year. The Feuilles d'Automne remained unpublished until 1876, a year which also saw the resurrection abroad of the career of the French waltz king, �mile Waldteufel, and a new wave of popularity in the Third Republic for this venerable dance. The Feuilles d'Automne were dedicated to Coste's friend and disciple Soffren Degen, a Dane whose precious col1ection of Coste manuscripts are today preserved in the Royal Library in Copenhagen.

Coste dedicated Marche fun�bre et Rondeau, Op. 43, to "Mme Coste, my pupil and my wife." The funeral march was a musical genre capable of expressing the most profound emotions, and consequently, it was particularly appreciated by romantic composers such as Beethoven, Chopin, and Liszt. The solo guitar may seem an odd choice of instrumentation for a funeral march, but there were a surprising number of precedents. As early as 1806- 7, The guitarist and publisher Anton Diabelli composed as Trauer Marsch upon the death of his beloved teacher Michael Haydn, and another to commemorate the death of the Empress Maria Theresia. Another Viennese guitarist composer, Simon Franz Molitor, penned a Marche fun�bre to commemorate the death of his fellow guitarist Franz Tandler. Coste's friend and teacher, Fernando Sor, composed several funeral marches-for guitar (in his Fantaisie etegiaque, Op.

59), for harpolyre, and for military band-including one commissioned for the funeral of Tsar Alexander I (1801-1825). Coste's contemporary and rival, Johann Kaspar Mertz, included a Trauer Marsch among his gloomy Nanien Trauerlieder for two guitars. Coste's Roudeau is light and tuneful, in striking contrast with the preceding piece.

Souvenir du Jura: Andante et Polonaise, Op. 44. The Jura is a region of western France which the Bourbon kings of the Ancien Regime had annexed from the medieval state of Burgundy, referring to it as the Franche-Comte. Coste's birthplace of Amondans was located in the Jura, on a fertile plateau south of Besan�on and not far down the picturesque Loue river from Ornans, which was immortalized by the painter Gustave Courbet. Much of the rest of the region consists of forested mountains, deep glacier-gouged valleys, and picturesque lakes. Here and there, subterranean rivers erupt from rocky hillsides; one such resurgence, the source of the Lyson river, inspired Coste to compose his Op. 47. The musical connection between the region and the music is not evident, but the florid Andante and the tuneful Polonaise nevertheless constitute one of Coste' s most attractive and popular solos.

Divagation: Fantaisie, Op. 45. The curious title Divagation implies wandering about with no particular destination; it is probably a reference to the sort of "rambling" which was basic to Romantic musical and literary culture, from Byron's Childe Harold to Liszt's Annees de p�lerinage. The title is also descriptive of the music, which features a very free introduction of schizophrenic mood changes, frenetic scales and passionate cadenzas, and concludes with a brilliant waltz-like allegretto.

Richard Long

Disc 1

La Ronde de Mai, Op. 42

(more info)